As well-known in the art, an automatic driving apparatus for automatic driving through driving location search is mainly applied to ships, airplanes and the like. Recently, the automatic driving apparatus is also applied to vehicles running on roads to inform a user of various information, such as driving route, degree of road congestion and the like, through a monitor, or to allow the automatic driving apparatus to drive a vehicle on its own or control a driving state.
In recent years, there has been ongoing research on an unmanned automatic driving apparatus. Such an unmanned automatic driving apparatus is able to perform automatic driving in an unmanned mode by detecting a drivable section by using, e.g., a radar, a ridar, an image sensor and the like, identifying the current position of the unmanned automatic driving apparatus using a global positioning system (GPS), and then generating a driving route of a vehicle for automatically driving to a destination in real time.
For such unmanned automatic driving, a function of finding a drivable section using various types of sensors (e.g., a radar, a ridar, an image sensor or the like) is necessarily required, and, in addition, a function of generating an overall driving route from a starting point to a destination, a function of generating a detailed driving route in a certain section, and a function of detecting and avoiding an obstacle in a driving section are required.
However, the automatic driving apparatus has not been commercialized yet because it needs a high-performance process capable of performing the above-described functions. Further, the automatic driving system has a reliability subject to be commercialized. That is, the automatic driving apparatus needs to recognize a driving environment and detect other vehicles in the vicinity in a moving state to be commercialized. However, an object, such as a vehicle, and its background may not be discriminated accurately which leads to frequent errors in tracking an object, and it is often the case that a moving object is mistakenly recognized due to changes in lighting.